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WoGF Review: The Boneshaker by Kate Milford
Nadine Gemeinböck (Linguana) has been reading fantasy for as long as she can remember. She started blogging about books on SFF Book Review in 2012, hoping to keep track of what she read and how she liked it. The book blogging community has since helped her open her literary horizons and thanks to WWEnd, she is currently working her way through NPR’s Top 100. Her blogging resolution is to review more foreign language books and finally take the plunge into a big, swooping space opera.
The Boneshaker
by Kate Milford
Published by: Clarion Books, 2010
Illustrated by: Andrea Offermann
ISBN: 0547487436
ebook: 384 pages
Series: Arcane #1
My rating: 7.5/10
First sentence: Strange things can happen at a crossroads.
Thirteen-year-old Natalie Minks loves machines, particularly automata — self-operating mechanical devices, usually powered by clockwork. When Jake Limberleg and his traveling medicine show arrive in her small Missouri town with a mysterious vehicle under a tarp and an uncanny ability to make Natalie’s half-built automaton move, she feels in her gut that something about this caravan of healers is a bit off. Her uneasiness leads her to investigate the intricate maze of the medicine show, where she discovers a horrible truth and realizes that only she has the power to set things right.
Set in 1914, “The Boneshaker” is a gripping, richly textured novel about family, community, courage, and looking evil directly in the face in order to conquer it.
WoGF Review: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
Jonathan Thornton (thrak) is a long-time science fiction and fantasy reader, but has only just started writing reviews on his blog Golden Apples of the West. Outside of reading, his interests are music and insects. His new year’s resolution is to review more of the books he has read on WWEnd and maybe finally get round to writing his own SF novel that he’s always talking about.
“It was as if the future were a treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the slightest use.” Hope Mirrlees only wrote one fantasy novel. Lud-in-the-Mist comfortably predates Tolkien and Peake‘s defining works of 20th Century English fantasy, yet it still feels wonderfully fresh and decidedly odd. Lud is situated on the confluence between two rivers: the Dawl, bringing trade and prosperity from inland, and the Dapple, which flows from the land of Faerie. The citizens of Lud have renounced all things magical, and with the growing influence of the supernatural preying on the town, it’s up to Nathaniel Chanticleer, the town’s mayor, to put things right. Though here be elves and faeries, they couldn’t be further away from Tolkein’s wise, good-natured and somewhat twee creations. Mirrlees takes her cues from folklore; the Fairies are mischievous and cunning, and as in folklore, Faerieland is conflated with the land of the dead. As in John Crowley’s Little, Big, which I am sure must have taken some of its cues from this book, the sense of threat is created by the encroachment of the world of Faerie on our reality. Read the rest of this entry »
2012 Philip K. Dick Award Nominees
The Philip K. Dick Award nominees for 2012 have been announced:
- Blueprints of the Afterlife – Ryan Boudinot (Black Cat)
- Harmony (alt.human) – Keith Brooke (Solaris)
- Helix Wars – Eric Brown (Solaris)
- The Not Yet – Moira Crone (UNO)
- Fountain of Age: Stories – Nancy Kress (Small Beer)
- Lovestar – Andri Snær Magnason (Seven Stories)
- Lost Everything – Brian Francis Slattery (Tor)
First prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, March 29, 2013 at Norwescon 36 at the Doubletree Seattle Airport Hotel, SeaTac, Washington.
What do you think of this list? Any favorites to win?
WoGF Review: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Star Hall (Stella Atrium) is a devoted reader and author of science fiction and fantasy. She writes: “I believe that reading and writing go hand-in hand. Each day I can learn from my characters and provide a big stage for them because I filled the creative coffers with good images from great stories.” Visit her website http://stellaatrium.com for more information.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold was published in 2002 and a Peter Jackson movie followed, so I’m not giving away secrets when I reveal that the narrator is a dead girl. This review includes specific plot details, though, so **spoiler alert**.
The story is about how family members work through grief and a little about cosmic justice. If the reader recently lost a loved one, this account may be heartrending.
Sebold managed multiple perspectives in each scene since the narrator spies from heaven and tells the story through the eyes of a suburban schoolgirl. The creative use of verb tense and simple sentence structure reinforces the deep but flat POV. Aspiring writers can take a lesson here about how to integrate “double voiced” sentences (see: Mikhail Bakhtin).
After she is murdered, Susie exists in “my own heaven” and frequently views family members, school chums, and the man who murdered her. For the first hundred pages, Sebold restricts the narration to the perspective of a 14-year-old girl who discovers secrets her parents hold dear and also how the world works. For example, she follows the rabbit that carries poison in the garden back to the burrow where the whole family dies.
Susie can spy on individual members of the family and school friends. Later she seems to view the whole town during a specific event (the escape of her murderer) for what each person is doing at that moment.
New E-Books from Clarke, Wolfe, and Foster
In discussions of the pros and cons of e-books, supporters of the growing shift toward electronic readers cite the convenience of e-readers and tablets, the ability to instantly download a new book when browsing an online store, and the cost-free virtual (and virtually unlimited) shelf space. Personally, the ability to accumulate more books without reaching the point of needing to add another room to the house in order to store them is a fantastic development.
But, to my mind, by far the largest boon of the e-book revolution is the way it has made available previously out-of-print backlists of a large number of authors that would have been unlikely to make it back into print as physical books, due to the economics of books publishing, and publishers’ increasing unwillingness to keep marginally profitable “midlist” writers works’ in print. Major publishers have slowly gotten into the act with digital reprints of the books they have rights to, but there also an increasing number of authors (or authors’ estates), the rights to whose backlists have reverted to them, who have taken the opportunity to arrange for digital reissues. Back catalogues that have appeared for the first time or been added to in the last few months include:
WoGF Review: A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
Rhonda Knight is a frequent contributor to WWEnd through her many reviews and her excellent blog series Automata 101 and Outside the Norm. Ronda is an Associate Professor of English at Coker College in Hartsville, SC. She teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature as well as composition courses.
Somewhere online I read that A Discovery of Witches is “Harry Potter for adults.” Similarly, I described the book to a relative as “Twilight for smart people.” (Since I’ve never read any of the Twilight series, I’ll accept any of the invective that you want to pile on for my snobbery). However, a book like this will inevitably be compared to these two behemoths of popular culture. Magic? Check. A brooding vampire? Check. A forbidden romance? Check. A movie deal in the works? Check.
Deborah Harkness freely admits that the current magic-and-vampire craze inspired her to write A Discovery of Witches. She remembers walking through an airport bookstore and wondering if there are witches and vampires, what do they all do for a living? In response to that question, she gives us Diana Bishop, a Yale history professor and the last of a long line of American witches, and Matthew Clairmont, a neuroscientist, a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and a vampire. Diana Bishop, in response to a childhood trauma, vows to give up all magic and buries herself in her research. Significantly, she researches early alchemical manuscripts, trying to show “how scientific this pursuit really was” (10). Her belief is that “[a]lchemy tells us about the growth of experimentation, not the search for a magical elixir that turns lead into gold and makes people immortal” (10).
SF Manga 101: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
Glenn Hough (gallyangel) is a nonpracticing futurist, an anime and manga otaku, and is almost obsessive about finishing several of the lists tracked on WWEnd. In this series on SF Manga Glenn will provide an overview of the medium and the place of science fiction within it.
And now for something completely different…
I don’t know about you, but I need a change of pace. The things which the top three mangas (GITS, Nausicaa and Akira) have in common is that they’re all heavy, earthshaking, violent, bloody, and transformational. They’re all big, bold, and serious, very serious SF. And since I can barely agree with myself on the pecking order for the top three, trying to do a top ten seems like a doomed methodology. So, change of pace.
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. This is what the publisher says about volume one, with my notes.
Kyon (1) is your ordinary high school freshman (2) who has long given up on his childhood dreams of encountering the fantastic and supernatural… or so he thought. From the very first day of school, his classmate – the beautiful but eccentric Haruhi Suzumiya – makes it very clear that her only desire is to meet aliens, time travelers, and espers! (3) A chance conversation between the two inspires Haruhi to form the SOS Brigade, (4) a school club created for the sole purpose of getting these supernatural beings together. The initial members consist of the mute bookworm Yuki Nagato, (5) the timid but voluptuous Mikuru Asahina, (6) and the polite and ever-smiling Itsuki Koizumi (7). But it isn’t long before Kyon realizes that Haruhi’s “helpless victims” are actually members of secret organizations – both futuristic and alien – keeping watch over Haruhi, as she is the pinnacle of some major calamity on the horizon (8)…
WoGF Review: Typhon’s Children by Toni Anzetti
Jack Dowden (JDowds) doesn’t review Sci-Fi/Fantasy books on his blog 100 Stories 100 Weeks. Instead, he’s set himself the unbelievably naive task of writing 100 short stories in 100 weeks. The results are often disastrous. He came to WWEnd to talk to people about Sci-Fi/Fantasy books though, and is having a wonderful time doing it! This is his first review on the site, and his first review for the WoGF Reading Challenge.
First, a disclaimer. I finished this book while reeling from the after-effects of the whiskey mixed with wine concoction my friends and I put together for New Year’s. So yeah, I was hung over. Still am a little, actually. Please don’t hold it against me, I’m doing my very best not to let the horse bucking around inside my skull taint my perception of this novel.
To make a long story short, this book was okay. Ann Zeddies (or Toni Anzetti as she calls herself here) managed to create a rich, biologically fascinating aquatic alien world. I rarely come across a world as interesting and diverse as Typhon in my reading. From ketos, to Round People, to Boogers, to the giant leviathans of the Deep, the inhabitants of Typhon are remarkable and very exciting to read about.
The biology of this book is what makes it stand out. The aliens you find here aren’t just some cleverly disguised humans. They’re alien. Communication via echolocation and scents excreted into the water, memories recorded in the form of underwater dance. Even the plant life briefly seen in the beginning of the book is given its fair shake. According to the back flap, Ms. Zeddies has been interested in biology and aquatic life since age three, and it shows here. The world of Typhon is fully realized and refreshing.
WWEnd Grand Master Reading Challenge: December Review Poll
Well, would you believe it? The Grand Master Reading Challenge has finally come to a close and this is the very last GMRC review poll! For December we featured 9 GMRC reviews in the blog and it’s time to cast your vote one last time for the best reviews.
Remember, you don’t have to be a GMRC participant to vote and the poll will remain open until January 15th so you have plenty of time to read any reviews you missed.
- The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov – Scott Laz
- Genesis by Poul Anderson – Allie
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – valashain
- Doomsday Book by Connie Willis – jfrantz
- The Listeners by James E. Gunn – charlesdee
- The Forever War by Joe Haldeman – triseult
- The Best of Frederik Pohl Edited by Lester Del Rey – chuhl
- Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin – Scott Laz
- Approaching Oblivion by Harlan Ellison – charlesdee
Winner gets the following:
- GMRC T-shirt – your choice of colors so long as it’s black
- GMRC button – you can never have too much flair
- Set of WWEnd Hugo Award bookmarks guaranteed to hold your place in any paper book.
- Book of your choice from the WWEnd bookshelf – winner gets a list of titles to pick from
- Everlasting Glory – So you’ll have that goin’ for ya. Which is nice.
Runners up will get a GMRC button and a set of bookmarks. Thanks to all our reviewers and good luck!
